FastTouch A13 7 Inch Tablet Review

Editor’s Note: There is an upgraded model of this FastTouch A13 7 inch tablet that only costs few bucks extra and comes with 8GB internal storage and dual cameras.

The FastTouch A13 7 inch tablet is a rather ordinary tablet available at a rather cheap price. This FastTouch tablet made its debut on Amazon store on June 12, 2013, and, since then, has become one of the bestsellers in its category, possibly due to its low price. For $70, the tablet comes with a 7″ capacitive touch screen, 4GB internal storage, microSD card slot, mini USB port, g-sensor, 512MB ram and AllWinner A13 processor. It doesn’t  have HDMI port and also doesn’t come with 8GB internal storage as mentioned in product listing title on Amazon. However, Still, at this low price, this tablet almost sounds like a good deal, but, is it? Lets find out in this FastTouch tablet review.

What comes in the box? The box includes the wall charger, user manual, a mini USB to USB cable (for connecting to your PC) and earphones. The manufacturer also included stylus pen and screen protector. But, there is no mini USB to USB converter cable for plugging in USB accessories. Also, the included user manual print is by far too small to read and is not very much helpful. This might cause problem for Android newbies.

Design & Build

One of the major problem with low budget android tablets like this FastTouch tablet is that there are plenty of identical tablets floating around in the market, but, under different names. This FastTouch tablet is no exception. Featuring an identical design like Chromo Inc® CHR-2416 7″ android tablet, Tagital A13 Q88, there is nothing unique about the design of this tablet. As usual, there are no physical buttons on the front, just a 1.3MP front camera and a 7 inch display with a thick bezel. The 3.5mm headphone jack, volume up and down buttons, and a TF card slot are placed on its right side. And, the power button, charging port and mini USB port are placed on its top right edge. Measuring 7 x 0.25 x 4.75 inches in dimensions and weighing 9.7 ounces, is however, quite comfortable to hold. It is also available in plenty of color options: pink, red, blue, and white. Lots of color choices, if you say.

Built primarily using cheap plastic, the build quality is definitely not awesome. There are good chances that it will not be able to handle accidental drops and spills. So, either buying a protective case or going for accidental warranty or not buying this tablet at all is the way to go.

Display & Audio

The 7 inch capacitive display of this FastTouch tablet has screen resolution of only 800×480 pixels which is slightly less compared to the 1024×600 pixels screen resolution of DragonTouch DT Y88. The touch screen takes some getting used to, but, for the price, its quite good.

For outputting sound, the tablet has a single speaker which is placed on its back side. The sound quality of the speakers is not excellent. Even the bundled earphones lack bass and treble, and are quite poor. The 3.5mm headphone jack that gives stereo output, however, is quite good. So, using a decent headphone can surely improve the listening experience with this device.

Hardware & Performance

Powering this FastTouch A13 7 inch tablet is a single core AllWinner A13 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, and 512MB DDR3 RAM. Since, the processor present in this tablet doesn’t support HDMI connections, its no doubt why the tablet doesn’t have HDMI port.

Now, if you are wondering how well this cheap android tablet performs then, it does lag sometimes specially while opening way too many apps. Other than that, it runs most of the Android apps like Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, etc. without much trouble. However, resource hungry apps like Asphalt 8 are beyond the capacity of this FastTouch tablet. So, until and unless, the plans does not involve running intensive apps and doing heavy multitasking, this tablet works well. But, if you plan to do intensive tasks or wants top notch performance without spending much, then, you will be better served by better performing tablets like Google Nexus 7.

Operating System & Apps

The FastTouch A13 tablet is running Android 4.1.1 Jelly Bean and comes with Google Play app store pre-installed. It is also preloaded with apps like Fruit Ninja, Angry Birds and Facebook which all works just fine. Skype and Netflix also loaded and worked fine. So did the YouTube app, which loaded and played various video clips without trouble. The stock media player support various multimedia file formats like AVI, MP4, FLV, 3GP, MKV, WMV, MP3, WMA, OGG, AAC, WAV, FLAC. But, still if there is any media file format that you encounter is not supported, then the support for the same can easily be added. Just install the appropriate media player from the Google Play app store. Even the stock browser loads web pages fine, and plays Flash videos without much trouble. The availability of over 30 language interfaces also make things bit easier.

Not only the multimedia files, when it comes to eBook reading, the tablet has native support for PDF and TXT file formats. However, EPUB is not supported. So, free app like Aldiko Book Reader  which not only support EPUB, but, PDF formats as well as Adobe DRM encrypted eBooks is definitely worth installing.

Camera

This FastTouch A13 tablet is supposed to have dual cameras if we go by its pictures being displayed on Amazon. However, it only has a front facing camera with a slightly better resolution of 1.3MP. This slight jump is clearly reflected in the pictures taken by the camera, as they are bit more clear and satisfactory. However, the front camera is still not meant for photography. But, for doing Skype calls, it serves the purpose well.

Storage Space

The tablet comes with 4GB (only around 2GB is usable) of internal storage space which can be increased by up to 32GB further. There is a micro SD card slot located on its right side, if you are wondering how its possible. Not only this, there is also a mini USB port which can be used to connect USB pen drives with the help of a mini USB to USB converter cable. The same port can also be used to connect other USB devices like external keyboards, USB mouse or even Bluetooth dongles.

Battery Life

The 3000mAh battery present in this FastTouch tablet is supposed to give working time of around 3-4 hours roughly as claimed by manufacturer. And, it does manage to give that backup under normal usage. This can be increased further by setting brightness to minimum and turning WiFi off when not in use.